dlaurencerogers wrote: Errors in this kind of discussion are in the eye of the beholder. The propaganda about the righteousness of the Southern cause has been almost unceasing since the war. The devil's bargain originally made in the Constitution over human rights still haunts us. The following quote from the Encyclopedia of Southern Literature sums up the conflict: "In 1866, Edward Pollard wrote a Confederate history of the Civil War entitled The Lost Cause in which he claimed that, although the South must “submit fairly and truthfully to what the war has properly decide,” the southern culture would carry on its beliefs (Pollard 752). Pollard’s assertion that the South would maintain its ideas turns out to be true. The South systematically attempted to wrest moral victory out of military defeat by writing its own history of the Civil War. This revisionist history of the Civil War is known as Lost Cause ideology."

“Every man should endeavor to understand the meaning of subjugation before it is too late… It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy; that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision… It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all that our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.” – Gen. Patrick Cleburne 1864

Mark wrote: Well played Mr. Rodgers. While I've not read your work, it seems to present a reasonable argument based on the current historiographic debates and its published by a very reputable publisher. It's worth remembering that ALL history is really an argument based on evidence. If history isn't "revisionist" its not worth doing. Best of luck with your book!

Mark
Yet he makes no mention of the propoganda of the righteousness of the northern cause.

"The Treasury of Virtue, which is the psychological heritage left to the North by the Civil War, may not be as comic or vicious as the Great Alibi, but it is equally unlovely. It may even be, in the end, equally corrosive of national, and personal, integrity. If the Southerner, with his Great Alibi, feels trapped by history, the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history, automatically redeemed. He has in his pocket, not a Papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history." (59)

"By the Great Alibi the Southerner makes his Big Medicine. He turns defeat into victory, defects into virtues. Even more pathetically, he turns his great virtues into absurdities--sometimes vicious absurdities."

"The Great Alibi and the Treasury of Virtue both serve deep needs of poor human nature; and if, without historical realism and self-criticism, we look back on the War, we are merely compounding the old inherited delusions which our weakness craves. We fear, in other words, to lose the comforting automotism of the Great Alibi or the Treasury of Virtue, for if we lost them we may, at last, find ourselves nakedly alone with the problem of our time and with ourselves. Where would we find our next alibi and our next assurance of virtue?" (76)

I don't think this is an argument I want to touch with a ten foot pole, but, Savez, you of all people should recognize that what one person calls a well supported historical argument is what another person calls yankee or lost cause propaganda. Complete historical impartiality is an impossibility because history is not a science. Cheers!

Mark wrote: I don't think this is an argument I want to touch with a ten foot pole, but, Savez, you of all people should recognize that what one person calls a well supported historical argument is what another person calls yankee or lost cause propaganda. Complete historical impartiality is an impossibility because history is not a science. Cheers!

Mark
I agree but some people want to ignore facts, or even worse, dismiss the many anomalies that are contrary to the popular beliefs concerning the Civil War. You posted while I was editing the above post. I explained, or let Robert Warren explain, the "Treasury and Alibi" more in depth.

“At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate States”.

Editor of economics, New York Times, March 1861 after the new Confederate Congress had shown they would have a low tariff policy.

Some Northerners saw it coming.

“The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing… it is very clear that the South gains by this process and we lose. No…we must not let the South go”.
Union Democrat Manchester, New Hampshire. 19 February, 1861

Southerners knew it too...

“They know that it is their import trade that draws from the peoples pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interest. These are the reasons why these people do not wish the South to secede from the union”.
New Orleans Daily Crescent-1861

Importers in New York and Boston refused to pay their duties on imported goods unless Southerners of the seceded states would also pay theirs. This was in March of 1861. A few days later Lincoln decided to "reinforce" Fort Sumter. Money, Money, Money.

The next is the system of revenue and disbursements which has been adopted by the government. It is well known that the government has derived its revenue mainly from duties on imports. I shall not undertake to show that such duties must necessarily fall mainly on the exporting States, and that the South, as the great exporting portion of the Union, has in reality paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue; because I deem it unnecessary, as the subject has on so many occasions been fully discussed. Nor shall I, for the same reason, undertake to show that a far greater portion of the revenue has been disbursed in the North, than its due share; and that the joint effect of these causes has been to transfer a vast amount from South to North, which, under an equal system of revenue and disbursements, would not have been lost to her. If to this be added that many of the duties were imposed, not for revenue but for protection--that is, intended to put money, not in the Treasury, but directly into the pocket of the manufacturers--some conception may be formed of the immense amount which in the long course of sixty years has been transferred from South to North

--John C. Calhoun 1850

“If they (the North) prevail, the whole character of the Government will be changed, and instead of a federal republic, the common agent of sovereign and independent States, we shall have a central despotism, with the notion of States forever abolished, deriving its powers from the will, and shaping its policy according to the wishes, of a numerical majority of the people; we shall have, in other words, a supreme, irresponsible democracy. The Government does not now recognize itself as an ordinance of God, and when all the checks and balances of the Constitution are gone, we may easily figure to ourselves the career and the destiny of this godless monster of democratic absolutism. The progress of regulated liberty on this continent will be arrested, anarchy will soon succeed, and the end will be a military despotism, which preserves order by the sacrifice of the last vestige of liberty.

They are now fighting the battle of despotism. They have put their Constitution under their feet; they have annulled its most sacred provisions; The future fortunes of our children, and of this continent, would then be determined by a tyranny which has no parallel in history.”
--Dr. James Henly Thornwell 1862

Mr. Davis, in conversation with a Yankee spy, named Edward Kirk, is reported by said spy to have said, "We are not fighting for slavery; we are fighting for independence." This is true; and is a truth that has not sufficiently been dwelt upon. It would have been very much to be desired that this functionary had developed the idea in some message, or some other State paper… instead of leaving it to be promulgated through the doubtful report of an impudent blockade-runner.… The sentiment is true, and should be publicly uttered and kept conspicuously in view; because our enemies have diligently labored to make all mankind believe that the people of these States have set up a pretended State sovereignty, and based themselves upon that ostensibly, while their real object has been only to preserve to themselves the property in so many negroes, worth so many millions of dollars. The direct reverse is the truth. The question of slavery is only one of the minor issues; and the cause of the war, the whole cause, on our part, is the maintenance of the sovereign independence of these States.…
The whole cause of our resistance was and is, the pretension and full determination of the Northern States to use their preponderance in the Federal representation, in order to govern the Southern States for their profit. . Slavery was the immediate occasion--carefully made so by them--it was not the cause. The tariff… would have much more accurately represented, though it did not cover, or exhaust, the real cause of the quarrel. Yet neither tariffs nor slavery, nor both together, could ever have been truly called the cause of the secession and the war. We refuse to accept for a cause any thing… than that truly announced, namely, the sovereign independence of our States. This, indeed, includes both those minor questions, as well as many others yet graver and higher. It includes full power to regulate our trade for our own profit, and also complete jurisdiction over our own social and domestic institutions; but it further involves all the nobler attributes of national, and even of individual life and character. A community which once submits to be schooled, dictated to, legislated for, by any other, soon grows poor in spirit;… its citizens, become a kind of half-men, [and] feel that they have hardly a right to walk in the sun.…
The people of Virginia do not choose to accept that position for themselves and for their children. They choose rather to die. They own a noble country, which their fathers created, exalted, and transmitted to them.… That inheritance we intend to own while we live, and leave intact to those who are to come after us.…
It is right to let foreign nations, and "those whom it may concern," understand this theory of our independence. Let them understand that, though we are "not fighting for slavery," we will not allow ourselves to be dictated to in regard to slavery or any other of our internal affairs, not because that would diminish our interest in any property, but because it touches our independence.

I am not ashamed of having fought on the side of slavery—a soldier fights for his country—right or wrong—he is not responsible for the political merits of the course he fights in ... The South was my country."

“You have no right to ask, or expect that she will at once profess unbounded love to that Union from which for four years she tried to escape at the cost of her best blood and all her treasure. Nor can you believe her to be so unutterably hypocritical, so base, as to declare that the flag of the Union has already surpassed in her heart the place which has so long been sacred to the ‘Southern Cross.’ ”
General Wade Hampton

"When the people of South Carolina, in Convention assembled, seceded from the Union of the United States, they put forth in justification of their course, as its proximate or immediate cause, the various acts of the people of the Northern States, interfering with their institution of slavery..."

(Robert Barnwell Rhett, in a public letter to former governor of South Carolina, William Aiken, Nov. 19, 1864.)

"Slavery, God's institution of labor, and the primary political element of our Confederation of Government, state sovereignty...must stand or fall together. To talk of maintaining our independence while we abolish slavery is simply to talk folly."

"What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North - was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery." -- Henry Benning of Georgia.

"The South went to war on account of slavery,...South Carolina went to war as she said in her secession proclamation, because slavery would not be secure under Lincoln,...don't you think South Carolina ought to know why it went to war?"

"There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races ... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas ..."

Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854,
“My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land." After acknowledging that this plan's "sudden execution is impossible," he asked whether freed blacks should be made "politically and socially our equals?" "My own feelings will not admit of this," he said, "and [even] if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not ... We can not, then, make them equals."

"We are fighting for independence and that, or extermination, we will have. You may emancipate every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves . . . if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames."

---Jeff Davis, July 1864

“Everyone should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope that it may find a place in history and descend to posterity. History is not the relation of campaigns and battles and generals or other individuals, but that which shows the principles for which the South contended and which justified her struggle for those principles. ”

---Robert E. Lee

“The contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions…are the general opinions of the English nation.”

---London Times, November 7, 1861

“The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

---Charles Dickens, 1862

“It is stated in books and papers that Southern children read and study that all the blood shedding and destruction of property of that conflict was because the South rebelled without cause against the best government the world ever saw; that although Southern soldiers were heroes in the field, skillfully massed and led, they and their leaders were rebels and traitors who fought to overthrow the Union, and to preserve human slavery, and that their defeat was necessary for free government and the welfare of the human family. As a Confederate soldier and as a citizen of Virginia, I deny the charge, and denounce it as a calumny. We were not rebels; we did not fight to perpetuate human slavery, but for our rights and privileges under a government established over us by our fathers and in defense of our homes.”

---Colonel Richard Henry Lee

There are reports floating that we are about to make a proposition to France and England that if they will recognize us...we will emancipate the slaves within twenty-five years... For my part I am in favor of it, and so is every man I have heard speak about it. If we continue to lose ground as we have for the last twelve months, we will soon be defeated, and then slavery will be gone anyway. I think it is better that we should give up slavery and gain our independence. There is no doubt in my opinion that we are gone unless something is done for our welfare and very quick.

“Our poor country has fallen a prey to the conqueror. The noblest cause ever defended by the sword is lost. The noble dead that sleep in their shallow though honored graves are far more fortunate than their survivors. I thought I had sounded the profoundest depth of human feeling, but this is the bitterest hour of my life.”

---Colonel John Singleton Mosby

(I) have always been a friend to the negro...have stood for his rights and represented him when it was really perilous to do so.

"Richmond papers advocate the abolition of slavery. This is my platform. We have to fight the war on slavery-it must fall, and the sooner, the better for us."